Local Activism: More Bang for your Buck

All the name-calling, finger pointing, deal making and hollow sound bites during the recent debt-ceiling debate led me to conclude this: If Americans keep looking at Washington for all the answers, we shouldn’t expect anything better from politicians who seem more worried about the 2012 election than the nation’s future. But we shouldn’t give up entirely on the political process. It’s time to pay more attention to the state and local levels, so our voices can be heard.

Our frustrations stem from the fact that many Americans – of all political stripes – believe in top-down solutions originating from Washington. Even if we say otherwise, our actions prove it to be true. We generally consider the national government and its offices to be more important. Think about it. How many of us who want a more responsive government are more willing to contribute or volunteer time to national campaigns than to state or local campaigns?

Research shows that Americans pay far less attention to state and local elections during nonpresidential election years. But when presidential candidates are ramping up for the upcoming election, Americans are more attuned to current events and are hoping that the next president can provide answers for our economic woes. (Since when so much responsibility was given to one person in our representative government, I can’t tell you.)

For those of us wanting a more responsive government, paying sole attention to capturing the nation’s capital is foolhardy. It’s like an overconfident taller boxer fighting a shorter man’s fight or like a slower basketball team with few substitutes running a full-court press against an up-tempo opponent. The boxer should avoid fighting with another’s preferred style, and a basketball team should plan to force its will on the opponent to play at its preferred pace.

The same concept can be applied to the political process. If you want a more responsive government yet concentrate all your effort on taking political control of Washington, you are competing exactly in the way your opponent prefers.

Participation in state and local elections seems intuitive to me. It’s at these levels that one can have significant influence on both politics and decisions that affect daily life.

It must be remembered, too, that seemingly sporadic and isolated political victories at the state and local levels can lead to widespread momentum. Consider the suffragette movement of the early 1900s, and in particular, the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and its state-by-state approach that contributed greatly to national political success.

Before the 19th Amendment passed in 1920, women voted in 15 states. In the West, where the rigors of frontier life made society more egalitarian in many ways, women gained the right to vote in two states (Wyoming and Utah) by 1871. By 1900, Colorado and Idaho had granted women’s suffrage. And by 1918, women voted in 11 more states.

NAWSA had numerous state and local chapters and published handbooks on how to organize at the grassroots level and influence local matters. In time, impatient and disenchanted suffragettes who worked strictly for a constitutional amendment adopted more militant tactics.

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Saving a splintering movement, Carrie Chapman Catt, a brilliant strategist known as “The General,” suggested her “Winning Plan” in 1916. It was an effort to work at the state levels and accept even partial suffrage in states that resisted wholesale change. Her goal was to get enough states to grant women the vote to make possible ratification of a proposed constitutional amendment. Victory was possible, too, if women in such states influenced their representatives to pass a constitutional amendment. When New York passed a women’s suffrage referendum in 1917, national opinion was more sympathetic to the issue. By 1920, the 19th Amendment had passed.

Catt knew that a “bottom-up” approach would work best. Today’s activists could learn from her example. When the same action produces the same undesired result, it’s time to adopt a different method. It’s time for Americans to stop focusing all of our political attention on Washington and devote more time and energy to the state and local political process.

Troy Kickler [send him email] has been Director of the North Carolina History Project since August 2005. He holds an M.S. in Social Studies Education from North Carolina A&T State University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Tennessee. His specialty areas are nineteenth-century U.S., Civil War and Reconstruction, African American, and religious history.

5 thoughts on “Local Activism: More Bang for your Buck”

Exactly what I have been challenging in Indiana for over three years. Indiana state government refuses to comply with the obligations in the Indiana Constitution and Indiana Code. The Court has stripped standing to object just because we pay property taxes as we are told there is no harm caused to us therefore we have no right to challenge taxes funding unauthorized purposes. Brown County local government has granted governmental authority to a non-governmental special taxing district which has seized property rights transferred by warranty deed from a private developer. The loss of property rights and constitutional protection is already at our back door, here we must draw the line. Challenge here first, you are yelling at the moon when the wolf is already in your home.

There are People who claim that Democracy does not exist, except in theory, and then there are those who say that some Countries are more Democratic than others.

I refer to three types of what is claimed to be Democratic Systems, and one is the American Style Western Democracies that most of the NATO Countries and their Puppets, and I shall refer to these as Western Democracy.

Another Countries that are Defined as Democracies are the rest the Countries that have Elections, or Non-Western Democracies.

The third type of Democracy can be described as the one Muammar al-Gaddafi created for Libyans.

The first thing that needs to be fully and properly understood that Democracy in America and its Puppets that look like Democracies does not exist, nor will it ever exist in Anglo-France, or with their Client Puppets.

Satan wants me to a Politician in my Country, but I do not want to become a Politician, and besides, there are many People who suspect and say that I am a Secret Servant of the Invisible Demons, and so would make it impractical in this English Speaking Western Democracy.

We know that the Bible says that anyone who does not believe in God is a Fool and that they are inexcusable for not believing in God, because the evidence is more than abundant, regardless of the lies of the Pretend Atheists.

Even though many People have accused me of being Secretly in League with the Invisible Demons, I will not confess to it, because I have been tortured in the invisible realm by the Invisible Demons before, and I will always deny being in League with the Invisible Demons, even if my denial is a lie to protect myself from being tortured by the Invisible Demons.

The Bible tells us that God is Eternal and Invisible, and that he had a family of good invisible angels in Heaven before He created the Earth and the first two People.

We know that some of the good angels rebelled against God, and those demons are as real and invisible as the gravity, the earth’s magnetic field, and radio waves.

Jesus said that the Invisible Satan the Devil is the Real Ruler of the Earth, and we know that the physical manifestation of that is that America, or Anglo-America is the Ruler of the Earth, because most of their Politicians are Secret Devil Worshippers.

They arrived in the territory of the Gerasenes on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. As Jesus stepped out of the boat, a man came out of the tombs and met him. The man was controlled by an evil spirit and lived among the tombs. No one could restrain him any longer, not even with a chain. He had often been chained hand and foot. However, he snapped the chains off his hands and broke the chains from his feet. No one could control him. Night and day he was among the tombs and on the mountainsides screaming and cutting himself with stones. The man saw Jesus at a distance. So he ran to Jesus, bowed down in front of him, and shouted, "Why are you bothering me now, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won't torture me." He shouted this because Jesus said, "You evil spirit, come out of the man." Jesus asked him, "What is your name?" He told Jesus, "My name is Legion Six Thousand, because there are many of us." He begged Jesus not to send them out of the territory. A large herd of pigs was feeding on a mountainside nearby. The demons begged him, "Send us into the pigs! Let us enter them!" Jesus let them do this. The evil spirits came out of the man and went into the pigs. The herd of about two thousand pigs rushed down the cliff into the sea and drowned (Mark 5:1-13).

We know that Anglo-France control the United Nations, and they get China to vote with them because the Pretend Atheist Chinese Leaders cannot be free from being tortured and manipulated by the invisible demons, because God will not keep the invisible demons away from Liars, because all Pretend Atheists are Liars.

I can assure People that no human being can resist the invisible demons unless they serve Satan, or if they serve God.

There could be People who think that I have been tortured by the invisible demons to provide this information at this time, because Satan wants People Western Puppet Democracies to believe that True Democracy is coming to the Satanic Dictatorships England, America, and their NATO Puppets, and to their Non-NATO Puppets in the World who pretend to be Democracies.

Democratic process got Jesus crucified, Democracy is majority rule whether the majority is good or evil. God forbids it Exodus 23:2 The Constitution precludes it, Art. 4. Sec. 4. Democracy is a matter of convincing the majority that evil is good and that those who speak the truth are ridiculed and punished. Our limited republic has been replaced with an unlimited democracy. Woe is us!